French Studies 597W - ST-ChgFamVal/AuSiecleDesLum

Pre-marital sex, adultery, divorce, birth control, women's education, women's right to political representation, these controversial issues were at the core of debates over woman's changing legal, social, and cultural status and of her role in the family in eighteenth-century France. We will examine woman's changing role as represented in the fiction and philosophical texts of the French Enlightenment. Readings from l'Abbe Prevost, Francoise de Graffigny, Diderot, Rousseau, Isabelle de Charriere, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Olympe de Gouges, the Encyclopedie, legal documents and polemical essays, in light of more recent anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic theory.